Forget Managing Magazines: We Need an E-Book Fulfillment Center

Amazon did a wonderful thing this week: Not entirely out the kindness of their hearts, the huge store and cloud storage company gave the world (or at least Amazon.com customers) a place to keep track of their print magazine subscriptions, from wherever they bought them. The Amazon Print Magazine Subscription Manager is a nifty digital file cabinet that keeps track of those subscription numbers and end dates, and lets you manage your addresses or even re-up for another year — again, tithing nothing to Amazon itself.

I say it’s not entirely out the kindness of their hearts because even a loss leader that increases brand awareness and gently encourages loyalty can pay big dividends. And, what do you know! Turns out Amazon is already a clearing house for lots and lots of print magazines, and wants to sell even more digital subscriptions for Kindles, especially for that brand-new tablet. If you already think of Amazon for books, the company wants you to think of them first for magazines, too.

It’s ironic, though, that this is yet another example where the magazine part of the media business has it all over the book part. Let’s set Amazon’s management system aside. Compare the prevalence of all-access digital subscriptions, which allow the reader to pay one price and get media every which way, with how books are still sold. Every personal library is a island; owning one format of a book entitles you to exactly nothing else.

I still hear gripes about having to receive physical media with a digital sub, but enduring mail delivery of a magazine is hardly a hardship and its wastefulness can be converted into an opportunity to share with a needy reader or your dentist. And a book, unlike a newspaper, isn’t a waste product at all, but a real, durable good.

Amazon seems to in a great position to be something of an honest broker in these matters. It may have faced off with publishers over setting its own e-book prices and backed off, but now the agency model where publishers set their own prices is firmly in place. Business is business, and Amazon generates a lot of business that book publishers like just fine. We’re ready for the next stage in rethinking the relationship between pricing, publishing, and print and digital delivery.

Magazine executives seem fine with Amazon elbowing in with the magazine vault idea — even though they don’t make any money from it directly and even though it might drive business through Amazon, which would then take a cut, rather than (say) the publisher’s own site or the Apple storefront. That’s because this is a tide which would seem to lift all boats.

What we need is for Amazon (or someone who wants to give the behemoth some competition) and the book publishers to get behind a centralized approach for print and digital books as well. In June, I touched on this in what turned out to be something of a third-rail piece arguing that e-books (not e-readers) aren’t “there yet.”

Mostly, though, that was only regarding the inability for readers to organize their book collection as they see fit. But I also argued that it’s galling to insist that I pay more than once for single piece of reading material. Now, magazine publishers are making my case for me.

What needs to happen now is for someone to build a cloud book repository that keeps track of what a reader owns — not just for social networking and library management, although those are good too. The key is to verify book ownership and to let the reader unlock other versions.

I state that generically, though I suspect the entry point would be — print.

This could be good for everyone. If a buy a book in a store secure in the knowledge that I can also read it with an e-ink device or a tablet if I wish, I won’t hesitate to buy that book. Which means that I won’t hesitate to go into a bookstore. Which means I won’t start thinking how print books are becoming irrelevant. Which means the future of books is eclectic and diverse, not zero-sum.

What could go wrong? Publishers might argue that all those print books will be shared with abandon, eating into their business. First of all, that would be premised on a remarkable admission: that nobody wants print books and are only buying them to get the digital edition. There probably will be some gifting and re-gifting. But is it a worse ding for me to buy a book and then lend/give it after I have read it than for me to buy a book and lend/give it as I read the digital version? Wouldn’t seem so. And that kind of lending, plus out-and-out piracy, are both already fairly well priced-in.

Putting that aside, however, the magazine folks seem to be OK with this. Yes, I know the business model is completely different: magazines make money from providing a crowd to advertisers, not really from the cover price and subscriptions, and books make all their money directly from the consumer.

Many readers, though, would balk at the thought of anyone having a full catalog of all the books they’ve read. Handing over that degree of information to Amazon, Google, Apple or anyone else smells too much like Big Brother. Yet it wouldn’t be mandatory. And for those of us who have already opted in to the new world of digital media, we’re already pretty much there, with Google Docs, Dropbox and, frankly, web-based mail.

Publishers get to charge whatever they want, based on the inflated physical media model. All they lose is the opportunity to sell the book twice, which I suspect happens close to never anyway.

Bookstores remain a destination for a bit longer, at least, extending their elegant and efficient supremacy as the best way to discover new titles to read.

E-book and tablet makers don’t have to pit themselves against the analog print world, or make excessive arguments about this being the future or whatever. Consumers will buy digital reading devices not because they want to zag, but because of the great flexibility they add to their lives.

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